After almost a century of making cars and selling them in more or less the same way, automakers (and others) are getting the sense that the business of automotive transportation might be about to change radically. Here’s Toyota executive Shigeki Tomoyama on the Uber deal: “Ridesharing has huge potential in terms of shaping the future of mobility.” – Bloomberg

Soon it may become much more difficult for you to actually drive a car.

You’ll be able to sit in one. You’ll be able to tell it where to go. But you won’t actually be able to propel it to a destination of your choice.

And if you have certain outstanding bills or have some sort of outstanding official issue, it will be very easy to remove your driving privileges.

Electrical cars may compound the problem due to limited range.

For people who like cars, it sounds like a discouraging future. But it is not a hypothetical one.

We can see from the above Bloomberg excerpt that top car executives are actively pondering ways to provide driverless cars-on-demand.

You will tell the car where you want to go and you will get there. Perhaps other people will be on-board with you – going to their destinations – as it would be with a shared taxi.

This is not entirely a marketplace evolution in our view. It is at least in part a manipulated industrial conclusion. It is the product of a certain set of shared beliefs married to newly available technology.

From our point of view these conclusions are even a kind of directed history.

As soon as it was possible, military interests began to work on robot soldiers.

Was the general public demanding robotic killing machines? It was obviously a priority of the military-industrial complex, not of the larger citizenry.

And now car companies are scrambling to produce cars you won’t own and can’t drive. This is being positioned as the “future” of cars.

Is this what people want? Or are there other more shadowy agendas at work?

How about vast wind farms and solar farms? At the same time as these enormous facilities are being built, traditional forms of power which people can use for themselves – like oil and coal – are being legislated out of existence.

More and more a practical impact of technology involves the removal of control from people’s everyday lives.

It used to be that technology enhanced people’s independence and lifestyles. But these days it seems to be working in reverse.

Technology is often seen as producing worrisome results as well, such as global warming.

Climate change and other supposed impacts of human beings on the environment have helped spawn the “tiny house” movement.

We recently wrote an article on the tiny house movement. You can see the article HERE.

The lowered expectations driving tiny house construction are at least partially a kind of dominant social theme, in our view. The conclusions – focused on fewer resources and less control – are a kind of directed history.

These seem to be top-down developments. The same elites that have generated the West’s current economic difficulties are now organizing a response to those difficulties.

One way to do it is simply by elevating the prospects of certain companies and diminishing others.

Facebook and Google both reportedly received CIA funding. It is probably no coincidence that these companies are the biggest in their respective spaces.

More:

Toyota is investing in and planning to collaborate with Uber, the largest ride-hailing service. Volkswagen is investing $300 million in Tel Aviv-based Uber rival Gett.

In January, General Motors put $500 million into Lyft, another Uber competitor. Earlier this month, Apple invested $1 billion in Chinese ride-hailing company Didi and Fiat Chrysler made a deal with Alphabet to develop self-driving minivans.

We’re supposed to believe all this activity is merely the result of industrial competition.

But we are not aware that driverless cars and ride-sharing are the motor-vehicle trends of the future.

In fact, if you asked most people, they might well reject both of these ideas as defining modern transportation alternatives.

People don’t ordinarily like to have control over their lives stripped away.

The big car companies are already positioning their upcoming products as tomorrow’s dominant form of travel. And the mainstream media will position this narrative as a natural market occurrence.

Conclusion: Be careful about emergent technological trends and your reaction to them. They will certainly have an impact on your life, but their rationale may be manipulated, not legitimate.